We’ve often discussed the psychology of criminals, especially violent criminals, and the determination of many progressives to superimpose motivations entirely different from those that are actually in play. See, for instance, these rather vivid examples, in which carjackers are more than happy to reveal what makes them indulge in carjacking.
Needless to say, it ain’t desperation.
I mention this because some fashionable and quite wrong-headed assertions are being aired, with an all too familiar imperviousness:
Efforts at correction ensue, including items that are brief but not irrelevant, and objections to the assumptions of such go-to pieties:
This chap helpfully remarks,
There is negative correlation between income and crime, but it’s not causal – it’s just that third factors (like lower IQ, executive function/self-control, high impulsivity, aggressiveness, etc.) cause both criminal behaviour and lower income.
Before steering the author of the original post to a study showing how sudden windfalls – say, lottery wins – have no effect on criminal tendencies, beyond a slightly increased risk of speeding tickets.
Ditto guaranteed basic incomes, as shown by this study.
Or put another way,
And I rather like this one:
At which point, readers may wish to revisit the carjackers mentioned above and their delight in seeing their victims soiling themselves in terror. Because, to quote a carjacker named Tall, “It’s a rush thing… I feel good.” Or as a female carjacker named PoPo put it, “It’s funny just to see them shaking and pissing all over theyself.”
The latter being a charming creature who assaults and terrorises random people, at gunpoint, robbing them of their cars and wedding rings, before getting her hair done.
The struggles of many progressives to understand what empathy actually is have been noted before, at some length and with relevant illustrations.
As I said at the time:
Understanding the mental states of others, their motives and assumptions, insofar as one can, doesn’t necessarily result in positive feelings towards them, or identification with them, or lead to a default forgiveness and willingness to excuse their behaviour. Simply put, if your “empathy” results in you being endlessly forgiving, endlessly accommodating, over and over again, then you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.
Or not doing it at all.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding the aforementioned imperviousness, I should add that, so far as I can see, the author of the original post, Mr JustJargons, has yet to respond to any of the quite numerous replies.
Commenter EmC quotes this,
You’re not being empathetic by assuming such people are just like you. What you’re doing is stripping them of agency by assuming their decisions are not based on their own subjective motivations, but on yours, and you’re abstracting them into a character following a script you wrote in your head. You’re being an asshole and mistaking it for kindness.
Adding merely,
Well, some things do bear repeating.
And when efforts at mitigation and excuse-making – invoking poverty – are applied to creatures like, say, the vile sow featured here, those efforts are hard to see as anything other than perverse.
As I said at the time, if you wanted to radically lower your estimation of the human species, she’d be the gal to call. Along with her social-media admirers. The ones applauding her chronic thievery and merrily clicking like.
For more on the subject of crime and those superimposed motives, see this trilogy of posts. In which, the featured perpetrators may make any progressive empathy, so-called, rather more difficult to sustain.
Update 2:
Commenter Geoff quotes this:
And when efforts at mitigation and excuse-making – invoking poverty – are applied to creatures like, say,
the vile sow featured here, those efforts are hard to see as anything other than perverse.
And adds,
If she moved into a nicer area, she wouldn’t stop being vile; she’d just make the area worse for everyone else.
That does seem more likely.
If good people fall on hard times and have to move into a bad area, this doesn’t generally change the nature of the area. They may simply become the latest victims of their new neighbours’ pathologies. But when bad people move into a good area, the effects tend to be negative and quite noticeable.
As Crémieux puts it in one of the replies,
The reason nice neighbourhoods are nice is because they’re full of nice people. Using longitudinal data, we can see that they don’t make people nice: moving into good or bad neighbourhoods doesn’t affect the risk of criminal offending.
In other words, nice neighbourhoods tend not to be occupied by creatures like the vile thieving sow featured in the video. And whose vileness will likely follow her whether she goes.
There’s a weird assumption of magic dirt, in which human capital, the quality of the residents, can’t be considered as a significant variable. The low crime rate and lack of overt pathology in an agreeable neighbourhood can only be “because people’s basic needs are being met.” It can’t be a question of the kinds of people who live there. One can’t acknowledge that some kinds of people are less functional than others. Lower quality.
That thought isn’t permitted.
See also this, on littering and the obvious variables one isn’t allowed to consider.
The determined avoidance of starkly apparent variables is quite remarkable.
Such that a supposedly serious article on litter inequality, citing a supposedly serious report on the same phenomenon, a supposed basis for government policy, somehow avoids any suggestion of agency on the part of the local population. Thereby giving the impression that nobody is actually dropping the litter, no-one is responsible. No-one keeps on doing it, over and over again.
The litter just appears, you see. Mysteriously, like overnight snow.
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